What Kamala’s final campaign push tells us about her secret fears

Kamala Harris is trying to convince Democrats and independents to support her. That seems standard enough, except we’re just two weeks away from Election Day — and Democrats’ much-loved early voting has been under way since September.

Persuasion is an essential part of any campaign, of course. The problem for Harris is that she’s still in persuasion mode in late October, when that bit is really supposed to be over. Sure, Democratic Party hijinks made it so that her runway was historically short, but even then, she didn’t really start campaigning until two weeks ago. Now she’s in a panic.

Trump is in base-turnout mode. His focus isn’t convincing new people — it’s getting those people he’s convinced to turn up and vote.

It’s not just her desperate pandering to black men, detailed expertly in the next part of this letter by Blaze politics reporter Rebeka Zeljko. It’s also her outreach to independents and disenfranchised Republicans on Fox News and her attempts to reach Joe Rogan’s mostly male audience.

In a normal campaign with a normal nominee, these moves might signal confidence and a candidate willing to brave the limits to bring in more voters. That’s what you saw when former President Donald Trump took the stage with New York City’s elite at the Catholic Al Smith charity dinner, as he did Thursday night, looking relaxed and beaming confidence. That’s what you saw when he spent Sunday serving up fries at a McDonald’s northeast of Philadelphia, in a move that threatens to change presidential campaigning forever. That’s what you saw when he entered a chanting stadium later that day for the Steelers-Jets game. As we’ve covered pretty extensively in the newsletter, this is not the impetus behind Kamala’s new strategy.

Strategists have even convinced former first lady Michelle Obama, who is notoriously not a fan of Harris, Biden, or really anyone other than herself (and sometimes her husband), to come off the sidelines and campaign with Barack and the vice president. That’s star power, but maybe not persuasion. For all his prestige, former President Obama is a uniquely ineffective surrogate: His charisma doesn’t seem to extend anywhere beyond himself.

Trump is in a very different frame of mind: He’s in base-turnout mode. His focus isn’t convincing new people — it’s getting those people he’s convinced to turn up and vote. He’s campaigning in Latrobe and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or Concord and Greenville, North Carolina, where he did well in 2020 but needs people to turn out in even higher numbers.

It’s where you want to be in the final stretches. It’s especially important when your voters might be feeling optimistic enough to skip the polls on Election Day if something inconvenient comes up.

Down-ballot Democrats are worried, too. Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey released an ad touting his support for Trump’s past trade legislation and his willingness to stand against a President Harris when necessary. Pennsylvania is a must-win state for either party and has been neck and neck for weeks.

Over in Wisconsin, Democrat Sen. Tammy Baldwin has an ad touting her work with Presidents Trump and Joe Biden — never even mentioning the current Democrat nominee. Public polling shows Trump with a thin lead in the Badger State, but as with Pennsylvania, those expensive and often more reliable private polls must be showing something uglier. Baldwin has certainly changed her tune from bashing Trump and his supporters as “offensive, hateful, [and] unacceptable” to openly courting them.

Trump is looking relaxed. Harris: desperate. Vulnerable Democrats: panicked. A billion dollars in spending can make a big difference, but right now all the money in the world hasn’t put Harris’ campaign where it needs to be on this final stretch.

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IN OTHER NEWS

Harris-Walz campaign pulls out all the stops to woo black men

By Blaze News’ new politics reporter, Rebeka Zeljko

Black men are turning their backs on Vice President Kamala Harris and turning out record levels of support for former President Donald Trump.

Among black male voters, 20% said they would vote for Trump even though just 4% considered themselves Republican, according to a New York Times/Siena poll from Oct. 12. Trump is on track to perform better among young black men than any other Republican candidate since 1960, according to CNN pollster Harry Enten.

Harris has managed to hold on to only 41% of support from black men ages 18-44, which is a 12-point deficit from President Joe Biden’s numbers and roughly half of former President Barack Obama's support among the demographic, Enten’s analysis found.

These figures have sounded the alarm for the Harris campaign. In an attempt to regain their support, the Democratic presidential hopeful curated a policy pitch to the “brothas,” as Obama said.

Obama lectured other black men during a campaign appearance last week meant to boost turnout for Harris.

“We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said to a roomful of black men. “Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothas. So if you don’t mind, I’m just going to speak to y’all directly.”

“You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses; I’ve got a problem with that,” Obama continued. “Because part of it makes me think, and I’m speaking to men directly, part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you're coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

Harris has made other attempts to bridge the widening gap between herself and black men.

Harris unveiled her “opportunity agenda” for black men on Monday, featuring policy proposals like forgivable loans for “black entrepreneurs,” bolstering cryptocurrency so black men “know their money is safe,” and legalizing recreational marijuana, despite overseeing over 1,900 marijuana convictions during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney.

However, the campaign’s last-ditch effort to regain the votes fails to address the actual policy priorities of black men.

As in other demographics, the economy remains the top issue for roughly a quarter of black men, according to the recent NYT/Siena poll. While Harris’ pitch to black men is tailored to address issues with a racial backdrop, only 4% said equality is their top priority and just 2% said the same for racial issues.

Democratic political pundits like former CNN host Don Lemon are even admitting that “Kamala Harris has a problem with black men.”

“There’s a problem,” Lemon said. “I went from battleground state to battleground state. ... It was not curated. I went up to people just doing man on the street and said, ‘Who are you gonna vote for?’ Black men, time after time after time, they said, ‘I’m voting for Donald Trump.’”